1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to integrated supply chain systems and more particularly to tuning order configurator performance by dynamic integration of manufacturing and field feedback information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, in integrated supply chain manufacturing systems, customers place product orders via a user interface, e.g., via a computer in communication with the Internet. The generation of valid orders is the main objective of an “order configurator” (also called a sales configurator.) Typical order configurators use a set of product offering rules that specify and validate the various factors of part/component combinations such as compatibility, min-max values, pre-requirements, co-requisites, component capacity, and the like. Product engineers and marketing personal typically will prescribe the relationships between different parts and the rules that govern the selections of these parts. The rules are updated to reflect upcoming product announcements, production needs, and corrections. However, during the delay before the issuance of the updated rules, the order configurator can generate orders containing parts that are failing in manufacturing or the field.
Failing parts in manufacturing are encountered, typically, during the testing phase of the product. Failing parts in the field are typically encountered when the product is shipped and installed at the customer site and the field. Reliability and availability issues including component fault and performance degradation are often reported through the service mechanisms after a system has been installed and activated. Unchecked these problems may cause deterioration in customer satisfaction, rework of installed systems, increased maintenance expenses, and loss of business.
Current systems are human-based, manual processes where manufacturing and field failure information are used to manually review the current configuration rules, e.g., from announcement letters and data templates, to determine which rules need to be changed or added. Often new rules are created and added instead of modifying existing configuration rules. Typically, order configurator product modelers will use modeling logic to implement any new rules. Issues with current systems include being manual, unreliable, inefficient, and rather slow. For example, it may take several months before the manufacturing and field failure information are used to modify the order configuration rules (if they are used at all).
Current methods do not offer dynamically integrated manufacturing and field feedback to effectively optimize or tune an order configurator based on reported manufacturing and field failure data. Accordingly, the current order configurators will continue to configure orders with non-reliable parts and/or part combinations. Additionally, with current methods, there is a lack of automatic modification of the existing configurator rules. However, adding new configuration rules to the order configurator can continuously increase the size of the order configuration bucket.